Started: June 16, 2026
A Dream of Red Mansions Family Tree: https://joelswagman.blogspot.com/2026/06/a-dream-of-red-mansions-tree.html
Links to stuff mentioned:
For our vacation videos, see here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSyBwmNz6w5o&si=twqhcTKQk8a0WyoI
Related Playlists
A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin and Gao E Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBl7dpw5Awdc&si=CcZVBsrHS-0VjFxj
Book Review Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOY-0V_l_9x7dao6py7ODX_PkUvrAEch7&si=EJ7CG8iO9IouNaYY
Books I Read in 2026: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOY-0V_l_9x7YYl7seud9ov0n6dtdHzvj&si=iMERlWtiF0Rq2-uy
The Great Chinese Classics Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBUwznOUYLDc&si=YDWqQ9QGbBg2wXzV
Classic Books Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOY-0V_l_9x53EsuWSZ-z0uFGL_0Jl6F1
2 comments:
Communist literature department always obligatorily calls any book that is descriptive about how harsh life used to be a critique of the system back then. To my ears (and maybe my classmates when we were classroom students) all that cliche phrases just mean "Well the author has sympathy for the characters in the work when he writes that".
When I read the poems of this book I failed to find anything enchanting about them. Whatever limited Chinese I have don't seem to see a tinge of attraction from the originals either. The song adaptations in a certain TV series sound great (I linked one of them once already) but more like due to the raw meanings and the words more so than them being any rhyming or something.
The only source of "rich" Chinese literature left remained I would love to study is only Shi Jing (books of classical poems). 80% of their entire literature tradition so far as I know of seems to be consisting of didactic stuff. Perhaps it's easier to find these sorts of stuff to be less fascinating when they are mostly in or absorbed into popular culture.
But yeah, if speaking for my own kinds then Chinese culture is really attractive (few of them bother to read Chinese classics but they do spend tremendous time on reading machine-translated Chinese web novels of all sorts). Even if not trying to point out ironies, seeing the very people who make derisive remarks towards them while having hobbies revolving around Chinese stuff other fellow countrymen may not even know of... is just something hard to get out of my mind. Oh I can go on and on about this topic if this is not just repeating some banal and lame stuff on and on.
That's a good point about how communist literary criticism tends to see everything as critical of a system, when often the author might only be describing individual hardships.
I had been curious about how the poems in this book would seem to someone who knew Chinese. Thanks for letting me know your opinion.
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